BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

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Thursday, February 25, 2021

Isaac Asimov (post 2): End of Life Manifestation of Multiple Personality?


In her epilogue to his memoir, Isaac Asimov’s wife recalls “an incident from Isaac’s last week at home [he was dying of heart disease and terminal kidney failure]. Isaac couldn’t talk much, and was asleep most of the time, but once he woke up looking terribly anxious. He said to me:


“I want…I want…”

“What is it, Isaac?” I asked.

“I want…I want…”

“What do you want, darling?”

It seemed to burst out of him. “I want—Isaac Asimov!”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s you.”

Then he said wonderingly, and with triumph, “I AM Isaac Asimov!” (1, pp. 561-562).


Was this his poignant wish to be healthy and full-functioning again? Or was this one of his unnamed personalities asking for his regular, named personality, and then the regular personality’s surprised, but triumphant response?


1. Isaac Asimov. I. Asimov: A Memoir. New York, Bantam/Doubleday, 1994. 

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